Warforged: How much does their adamantine/mithral sell for?

[ARandomGod]

General question for the Eberron setting.

I know this has *had* to have come up for some people before. If you kill a warforged and rip off it's mithral or adamantine, how much would it sell for?

It doesn't really look like the game designers meant it to be sold for anything, but realistically this is a rare metal, so what sort of guidelines would YOU use? What sort of volume of metal do you think a person could salvage?

(Additionally, what if you were to find adamantine or mithral from a source that was not previously 'living', how much would IT sell for by volume?)

 

[Glyfair]

Keith has said the intent is for the armor to only be laced with mithril and adamantine. There isn't enough to salvage for anything significant.

Also, trying to do so is sort of like harvesting organs from elves and dwarves you kill to sell for profit (or use for experiments). The people who would likely be interested in the products aren't very likely going to like where it came from.

 

[ARandomGod]

Keith has said the intent is for the armor to only be laced with mithril and adamantine. There isn't enough to salvage for anything significant.

PS: I've already thought of several issues/ways to deal with the attempting to sell metal from a downed warforged (really, we can't have it TOO great).

But yes, it's pretty clear that the game designers didn't *mean* for it to sell for all that much. On the other hand, if someone could make an alloy that gives DR 2 by adding an insignificant amount of adamantine to normal armor, that opens up an entirely different can of worms. I mean, why not pay that extra 5 GP and lace your armor with adamantine for DR2?

Hrmm?

And, for that matter, pay an extra 50 gold to lace it several times with mithral so as to make it very, very fluid.

All that aside, however, the players have also just collected a couple of large adamantine doors, and the game listed how big and how thick the adamantine portion of the doors were. I think that it's pretty clear the writers didn't intend for players to take those doors, but if they did/do...

Also, trying to do so is sort of like harvesting organs from elves and dwarves you kill to sell for profit (or use for experiments). The people who would likely be interested in the products aren't very likely going to like where it came from.

It's the warforged characters themselves who did the collecting, and I'm sure that the resulting harvested skin can be melted down...

 

[Glyfair]

All that aside, however, the players have also just collected a couple of large adamantine doors, and the game listed how big and how thick the adamantine portion of the doors were. I think that it's pretty clear the writers didn't intend for players to take those doors, but if they did/do...

Good luck getting out from where they're buried. Especially considering the area you're likely to be bringing it though is probably one of the most crime-ridden areas of Sharn.

 

[Glyfair]

BTW, here is Keith's take on the issue:

3) What is done with deceaced warforged? Do people tend to dismantle them or burry them? I assume that this is one of those questions that everybody does their own thing, just checking to make sure that House Cannith does not have some kind of "Bring in a warforged body for a few silvers" kinda thing.

I'm sure people do their own thing, but burying them just seems weird - though I would see it becoming more common as they become seen as individuals. I would imagine that the "proper" thing would be to return them to House Cannith, which would recycle them. There has already been exhaustive discussion of the value of the metal in a warforged, and the key factor is that "adamantine body" really isn't as simple as a layer of adamantine covering the body, and that raw materials are never as valuable as finished objects (compare the market cost of 50 pounds of iron to a suit of full plate). Not to mention that scavenging warforged corpses for profit would be seen as a distatsteful career -- and possibly criminal if it was believed that you were killing them yourself. So I'd see a few gold "deposit" on a warforged as being reasonable if you are returning it to Cannith; possibly 100 if you want to sell it as scrap and can find a smith who is a) willing to deal with you on this questionable enterprise, b) works with the metal in question (the typical village blacksmith can't work with adamantine), and c) has the money to spare. I don't plan on getting into the "selling warforged corpse" discussion again; if you want the price to be higher, set it to what you feel is reasonable

 

[Staffan]

IMC, adamantine exists in two states: "raw" and "forged". Raw adamantine is nowhere near as hard as forged adamantine, and can be shaped with relative ease, with the process of shaping it also turning it into forged adamantine.

Forged adamantine (which is the one with the stats from the DMG) on the other hand, is almost impossible to reshape, to the point where it's cheaper to get new adamantine. So you can't really sell adamantine for scrap metal, you can only sell it for what it has been turned into.

I admit that this is a trick I use to be able to use adamantine doors and the like in my adventures without having to worry about the PCs selling them and getting stupidly rich. Now, they could sell the doors as doors (assuming they can bring them), but I imagine that the market for adamantine doors with specific markings is pretty limited. It also solves the problem with warforged and adamantine body - it's not just distasteful to sell a dead warforged, it isn't very economical.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I can't imagine coming back with warforged plating is too different to citizens of a city than adventurers regularly coming in with bloody magical/masterwork armor. Do they think the adventurers are just finding all this loot or only killing monsterous humanoids? I would imagine that they've killed far more humans than warforged. If they're really worried, they can melt the armor down into balls of metal with fireballs.

 

[Klaus]

On the issue of the Adamantine Doors from The Forgotten Forge:

1 - There's no way short of a Portable Hole to get them out of the ruins, since the only way out is a small hole that leads to a vertical shaft and is located 6' off the floor.

2 - The entire ruin is property of House Cannith, being an ancient forge, and they'll probably frown on cutting out chunks of such an archaeological find.

3 - A 6-pound adamantine battlexe costs 3010 gp, whereas a 1-pound adamantine dagger costs 3002 gp. You can see here that the ammount of adamantine used has next-to-no bearing on the value of an item, it's the craftsmanship that costs so much. One possible explanation for this is that you'd need a special super-hot forge, expert smiths and secret techniques to forge adamantine, so even if you drop a 1000-pound chunk of adamantine on a buyer's lap, you'd get little in return. At most, if a buyer could be convinced to use the doors as-is (and cut a fitting hole in his house to put them), you'd get around 6000 gp for the set of double doors.

4 - Same goes for a warforged with adamantine body: you'd need som many special tools to extract, refine and reshape the adamantine from its body that it wouldn't be cost-effective to do it.

In the case of a warforged, the PCs' best bet would be to stick it into a bag of holding and sell the inert body back to House Cannith, although that still counts as body trafficking by the Code of Galifar (warforged are treated as any other sentient race, with equal rights and protection).

 

[Soullessweare]

Hmm.

There's a 5 pound difference between a dagger and an axe. But that includes the (probably) wooden handle. So let's assume the difference in adamantine is about 4 pounds. The price difference is 8 gp. That's 2 gp to the pound of adamantine. What does a gold coin weigh? An ounce? So a pound of gold is 50 gp. Assuming a somewhat stable and rational economy there should then around 25 times more winnable adamantine then gold in the world.

Doesn't make sense does it? Figure it out for some other stuff. It all doesn't make sense. It's just figures the designers eye-balled for playabilities sake. If you care enough to discuss all this, you might want to revamp the economic system. Try to make a little list of the worldwide availability of different usuable resources, base their relative price on that...

 

[Estlor]

What continually amazes me is how people keep asking this question under the assumption that taking the adamantine body of a warforged is like looting armor off of a fallen foe.

Um, no.

It's like flaying the warforged and trying to sell its skin for profit! Within the scope of the D&D game that sound like a very evil act. Mutilating and desecrating bodies for jollies? What's next, kicking puppies?